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Green_Warrior
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by Green_Warrior Sun May 01, 2022 7:17 pm

REPO Man wrote:The GameCube was the first console I bought with my own money. It was 2002, the summer before junior year of high school. I worked at my dad's job site toting lumber for a few weeks. I bought a jet black one, four controllers, Luigi's Mansion and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.


I wonder if that would cost you more today than it did back then? I remember at one point, the Gamecube was discounted all the way down to $150 or maybe even $100. Probably not as early as 2002, but those games and the controllers have become a lot more expensive in recent years.

At any rate, you've inspired me to make Luigi's Mansion the next game I play. I've been holding off on the newer ones because I never finished the original.
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Note
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by Note Sun May 01, 2022 11:51 pm

Green_Warrior wrote:I wonder if that would cost you more today than it did back then? I remember at one point, the Gamecube was discounted all the way down to $150 or maybe even $100. Probably not as early as 2002, but those games and the controllers have become a lot more expensive in recent years.

At any rate, you've inspired me to make Luigi's Mansion the next game I play. I've been holding off on the newer ones because I never finished the original.


Just wanted to say I finished Luigi's Mansion last year, and it's definitely worth a playthrough! It's a shorter game, but it's really a lot of fun and I found the controls to be intuitive. I missed out on it when it originally came out and glad I finally experienced it. I'd like to check out the sequel on the Switch sometime as well.
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elricorico
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by elricorico Mon May 02, 2022 11:10 am

1. Pokémon Brilliant Diamond (NS)
2. Metal Slug 3 (XBO)
3. Wii Sports (Wii)
4. Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse (GEN)
5. Arc the Lad (PS)
6. Rayman Origins (PC)
7. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC)
8. Final Fantasy IX (NS)
9. Kirby's Return to Dream Land (Wii)

10. Mario Golf - Advance Tour (GBA)


Back in 2015( :shock: I knew it had been a while, but I didn't think that long!), I started playing this to join in on Together Retro. Got through most and enjoyed it quite a bit but got stuck, struggling to win the last tournament before the credits. A couple weeks back I picked the game up to fill a few minutes and had a decent round which motivated me to fight through to the end. After a couple of late collapses I put together a round that gave me first place and the credits rolled. There is what I would consider a post-game course, but it is terribly tough and full of crazy obstacles, so I don't see myself battling through to win that one any time soon.

This is the only Mario Golf game I've played, and much like many of the Mario Sports games it is easy to pick up and play but has a level of depth that is fairly impressive if you put the time into it. Your golfer levels up over time and you can decide how they grow, you have a partner that levels along with you if you so choose, and there are rivals and various challenges on top of the usual tournaments. The actual golfing allows for a fair bit of strategy on how you hit your ball, and I suspect I only really figured out about half of the finer points.

Fun game for sure, if you have any interest in golf games. Can get very challenging at the end and has enough variety that I actually have about 40 hours altogether on my saved game.
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MrPopo
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by MrPopo Mon May 02, 2022 10:06 pm

Note wrote:
Green_Warrior wrote:I wonder if that would cost you more today than it did back then? I remember at one point, the Gamecube was discounted all the way down to $150 or maybe even $100. Probably not as early as 2002, but those games and the controllers have become a lot more expensive in recent years.

At any rate, you've inspired me to make Luigi's Mansion the next game I play. I've been holding off on the newer ones because I never finished the original.


Just wanted to say I finished Luigi's Mansion last year, and it's definitely worth a playthrough! It's a shorter game, but it's really a lot of fun and I found the controls to be intuitive. I missed out on it when it originally came out and glad I finally experienced it. I'd like to check out the sequel on the Switch sometime as well.

Luigi's Mansion is an overall great game. Definitely worth a pickup.

I played Star Fox Assault several years ago, and the thing that struck me as I played it was that they had the balance off on the shooting. I felt that I needed to wear out my A button to get anything done, whereas Star Fox 64 made much better use of popcorn enemies and lower hit requirements on non-bosses. Also, Star Fox 64 only ever gave you a single non-Arwing level in a route, so it was just a neat gimmick to change things up. Assault leans fully into "here's a bunch of variety", which makes the fact that the gameplay direction isn't optimized for the non-Arwing stuff stand out more.
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by MrPopo Sun May 08, 2022 10:56 pm

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

1. Underworld Ascendant - PC
2. Castlevania: Harmony of Despair - PS3
3. Ni no Kuni - PS3
4. Operencia: The Stolen Sun - PC
5. RPM Racing - PC
6. Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem - PC
7. Pokemon Legends: Arceus - Switch
8. Ni no Kuni II - PS4
9. Everspace - PC
10. PowerSlave Exhumed - PC
11. Horizon Forbidden West - PS5
12. Elden Ring - PS5
13. Shadow Warrior 3 - PC
14. Ghostrunner: Project_Hel - PC
15. Triangle Strategy - Switch
16. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - PC
17. Nightmare Reaper - PC
18. Kur - PC
19. Gundam Versus - PS4
20. BIOTA - PC
21. Chantelise - PC
22. Xenoblade Chronicles - Wii

Xenoblade Chronicles is a late-life JRPG for the Wii that almost never made it to the US. For some reason Nintendo was only going to localize it for Europe, but a grassroots campaign got them to release it in the US. And a good thing, as it turned out to be a significant hit, leading to a couple of rereleases plus a few sequels. And to get it out of the way, if you don't already have the game and want to play, do one of the rereleases. The original is missing a lot of quality of life compared to them.

the game opens with two giants, the Bionis and the Mechonis, battling each other amidst an endless ocean. Eventually, they mutually kill each other, and life arises on both. Now, that isn't a creation myth; that's actually what happens. As you explore the game you get to see the giants, and you are climbing all over them. Don't ask how the gravity works. The names will give you a clue as to the prime conflict in the game; the humans and other races of Bionis against the mechanical life of Mechonis. It's fairly standard stuff at the get go, your village gets attacked by the machines, someone close to you is hurt, you swear revenge, you pick up friends along the way. However, in the latter third of the game the plot really starts to get interesting, with some standard twists alongside some unexpected ones, and then when you beat the final boss you get a major info dump that will be followed up in future games.

The game can be compared to Final Fantasy XII in terms of both showing influences from MMOs. You have very large spaces to run around in, fights are just a matter of you aggroing enemies on the map with no transition, and you auto attack plus use abilities gated by a cooldown. There is no MP, just cooldowns, and the game ends up feeling like its combat system is a bit cobbled together. There is no elemental damage, but there are two different kinds of enemies. The mechanical enemies (mechons), and everything else. Everything else can just be beaten on, but mechons can only be hurt by by the protagonist's weapon, by the protagonist casting a buff on his party, or by first toppling them. This ends up being quite annoying as the game moves on and they become more prominent, because it constrains your party selection unnecessarily. And my mention of topple pulls in the next thing; there is a system of debuffs, where you can first apply break, then you can apply topple to a broken enemy and daze to a toppled enemy. Break is a minor debuff, but topple and daze are hard CC, so they are quite useful. You can also keep reapplying those statuses when the enemy is in it, which extends the timer. Really powerful parties can straight up topple lock enemies, including bosses. But this system also requires you to have some specific party makeups, as the availability of these statuses is spread acorss the party. Finally, a few characters also have position based effects, where you can do extra damage from behind or apply a status effect from the side. The whole thing is rather busy, not helped by the locked camera angle and loads of particle effects. One thing you didn't see me mention is healing; healing is incredibly deemphasized in this game. There is one primary healer with long cooldowns, and a couple characters have some minor healing also on long cooldowns. You're best off either topple locking or stacking agility to dodge everything.

The game is frankly a technical marvel for the Wii. The load times are extremely minimal and the world is huge. But unfortunately, the gameplay suffers, because your only traversal is walking and fast travel between sporadic points you've already visited. The game tosses a metric shitton of sidequests on you which can be extremely luck based, like collecting N of an item that randomly spawns on the ground, or getting X random drops off an enemy. There's also lots of vague directions in the quests. I am to understand that most of this (aside from just the sheer distances) is resolved in the rereleases. I got about halfway through the sidequests in the first area before I realized just how much busywork it was. As a result I basically did no other ones (a few opportunistic "kill Z monsters" notwithstanding), which meant I didn't participate in a major narrative sidequest series. The sidequests also give you so much XP that you end up powerleveling just by doing them. So I ended up powerleveling the old fashioned way; an exploit to get to level 50 early on followed by a few cheese spots to insta kill high level enemies. And I'm glad I did; the combat I found to be less fun and more tedious, as either you were high enough level that your rotation beat the enemy or you died from being too low level/getting a bad random status at the wrong time. Since you have a limited action bar it's not like you have the deep pool of options that Final Fantasy XII gave you to provide real strategy in combat.

I really have mixed feelings about the game. I thought the story was interesting and well executed, but the moment to moment gameplay was more of a chore. When I was done power leveling I could skip most of that, so then I got to see just how unnecessarily big the zones were. I think there were good ideas here, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired.
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elricorico
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by elricorico Mon May 09, 2022 11:56 am

1. Pokémon Brilliant Diamond (NS)
2. Metal Slug 3 (XBO)
3. Wii Sports (Wii)
4. Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse (GEN)
5. Arc the Lad (PS)
6. Rayman Origins (PC)
7. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC)
8. Final Fantasy IX (NS)
9. Kirby's Return to Dream Land (Wii)
10. Mario Golf - Advance Tour (GBA)

11. Cat Quest (PC)


Last week I finished Cat Quest on PC. This game showed up for "free" with Amazon Prime, and I knew a good friend that had a platinum trophy on PS4, so I was motivated to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did.

Cat Quest is a simplified action RPG - you play a cat warrior that can learn magic, wield weapons and dodge roll. The world map is relatively small and you are free to explore much of it right from early on. The story is relatively light and often a little silly, peppered with cat puns in almost every bit of dialogue. Where this game shines for me is the fast paced gameplay pattern. Each part of the main quest, and every side quest, can be done in about 5 minutes. There is a steady feeling of progression. Your cat levels up regularly, almost with every quest you finish. I found myself regularly playing "just one more side quest" 10 or 12 times in a row before putting it down.

While I didn't have a timer to refer to, this is definitely a game that will take less than 10 hours, and with the great pacing it felt even shorter to me. The ending was a bit of a let-down, it felt like it was really lacking one more boss/story piece to close up the narrative. I didn't have achievements on the PC version, so I didn't play every single quest or gather every piece of equipment, but if I had played on a different system I'm sure I would have gone for completion.

Cat Quest really hit the spot for me. Tight control and an addictive gameplay loop. Simple but pleasing audio and graphics. Just plain fun.
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by Nemoide Mon May 09, 2022 9:00 pm

THE LIST:
1. Diddy Kong Racing (N64)
2. Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube)
3. Freedom Planet (Switch)
4. Aleste (PS4)
5. Gunpey DS (DS)
6. GG Aleste (PS4)
7. Dr. Mario (GB)
8. Motor Toon Grand Prix (PS1)
9. PaRappa the Rapper (PS1)
10. GG Aleste II (PS4)
11. Power Strike II (PS4)
12. Rusty's Real Deal Baseball (3DS)
13. GG Aleste 3 (PS4)
14. Darius (PS4)
15. Darius: Extra Version (Genesis)
16. Cave Noire (Game Boy)
17. Mary-Kate & Ashley: Get a Clue! (Game Boy Color)
18. Sakura Wars (Saturn)
19. Pretty Girls Panic! (PS4)
20. OutRun (Game Gear)
21. Bust-A-Move (Game Gear)
22. Balan Wonderworld (PS4)


20. OutRun (Game Gear) - A satisfying though heavily scaled-down version of Sega's super-scaler classic! I love OutRun but for some reason this game wasn't released for the Game Gear in the US! I feel like it's easier than it should be: there are no difficulty options and it only took me a couple tries before I got to an ending. Unfortunately the actual endings seem to have been cut which saps my motivation to replay a lot. But one really cool new feature is a two-player mode! OutRun was famously a driving game instead of a racing game, but making a competitive version does make sense. You can play against a computer, which is okay, but I dream of playing against another person. This game doesn't have a ton of substance, but it's got a good vibe and feels true enough to the arcade original to be worthwhile.

21. Bust-A-Move (Game Gear) - A surprisingly accurate port of the original Bust-A-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble). Unfortunately, I've been spoiled by being used to Bust-A-Move 2 on the Saturn. There's only one song that repeats for each stage and there are 100 stages you just play in linear order rather than the Darius-style level-select. I was playing on the Analogue Pocket and it felt like it may have made the game a little too easy: it felt like I was making MOST tricky shots, presumably as compensation for the blurry screen of the original Game Gear. I did use save states instead of continues, but I don't think I actually needed to since I only failed a handful of stages. But at the end of the day, it's Bust-A-Move and I love Bust-A-Move! It's such a satisfying form of puzzle game. I see myself picking this up regularly to just play through a bit when I feel like killing some time. Even though the stages are linear, there's a fun little "challenge mode" where you just pop infinite bubbles as they come down from the top. I'm really glad that's there! And like OutRun, there's a two-player mode I'd love to try but don't know if I'll ever get the chance. I do have a friend who has a Game Gear, but the capacitors have died and they aren't too eager to repair it.

22. Balan Wonderworld (PS4) - Probably the final game by Yuji Naka, as well as the final collaboration between him and Sonic co-creator Naoto Ohshima. This game was critically maligned the moment the demo was released and it's recently been revealed that Yuji Naka was fired from the project 6 months before it's release and he considers the game to be unfinished. How does it hold up? Surprisingly well if you're the kind of person who can appreciate deeply flawed but interesting games! The whole game feels like a throwback to the 3D platformers of the 90s and early 2000s - I got a Billy Hatcher vibe from the whole thing.
The story is barely told: you're a kid who's emotionally distant, you go to a weird theater and from there find yourself in a world where you play different stages that reflect various people's concerns and emotional problems. Each stage ends with a musical number and it doesn't quite work as well as it wants to, but it's interesting and I appreciate the music. The game is in a made-up language, which I always like. There's also Balan, the guy on the cover of the game. What's his deal? I don't know! He's in the backgrounds of cutscenes, you collect statues of him, and eventually he does things like unlock more stages and reveal what he looks like at the end of the game. He also shows up for "Balan's Bout" mini-games which are sort of QTE style levels that unlock more gems or trophies (and are the worst part of the game IMO). The focus on each stage is COLLECTING: you want to collect Balan statues in order to unlock those additional stages, collect costumes that give you one specific power at a time, and collect various gems. You can feed the gems to "Tims" which are little fuzzy Chao-like creatures which shows that Naka's back on his A-life kick. The Tims are poorly defined: feeding them makes them grow and when they get large, you can throw another Tim at them to make them reproduce. And they like to turn a little gear that makes a counter go up. When the counter goes up it unlocks vague things like "partially restore the clock of happiness."

I thought most of the stages weren't all that much fun on my first playthrough of them, but you're supposed to revisit them and each time I revisited a stage I was surprised at how much more I enjoyed it - they go a lot faster on the second go around when you're not trying to explore each nook & cranny! This game feels like it's meant to be played with a nice meaty strategy guide. Some of the statues are tricky to find or require costumes from other stages that can be hard to find. You don't need all the statues to finish the game and I don't know what would compel someone to keep playing to get them all - it wasn't as much fun as it should be and the poorly-designed Balan's Bout trophies (if you fail, you'll have to restart the entire main-stage) are too much of a pain to be worth it IMO. I don't know why I should bother to keep feeding my Tims or repairing the Clock of Happiness. But I kind of appreciate that kind of opaque game design, like what Nights into Dreams did with the A-life system which has some really cool stuff totally hidden from 99% of players (ie King Pians and their castles).
The game has some real problems and I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but it's also kind of interesting and worth checking out as a curiosity if you like older Sonic Team games, collectathon platformers, or 90s-era 3D platformers in general. It's not worth full retail price, but it's so easy to find cheaply that it's not a big financial risk if you're so inclined. (Be warned: from what I've heard the Switch version runs very poorly)
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PartridgeSenpai
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by PartridgeSenpai Tue May 10, 2022 5:25 am

Partridge Senpai's 2021 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
* indicates a repeat

1. Dandy Dungeon: The Legend of Brave Yamada (Switch)
2. Dandy Dungeon 2: The Phantom Bride (Switch)
3. Mon Amor (Switch)
4. Terraria (PC)
5. Puppeteer (PS3) *
6. Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon (PS1)
7. Project Altered Beast (PS2)
8. Devil Summoner II: Soul Hackers (Saturn)
9. Kirby Star Allies: Heroes in Another Dimension (Switch)

10. Kirby's Dream Land 2 (GB)

After playing Star Allies a bunch, I was on quite the kick for more Kirby games, and I played through a good few I'd played through before. This was the only one of the bunch that I couldn't remember if I'd ever actually beaten, let alone with the real ending, so I felt writing a review for this one at least was proper. It took me 4 hours or so to beat an emulated version of the game using my Xbone controller.

The story is, as expected for a GameBoy game, very simple. Dream Land is once again under threat, and this time by the nefarious Dark Matter! Kirby needs to set out to stop him with the help of his three new animal friends, and if he can collect the 7 rainbow drops spread throughout the land, he can take on Dark Matter and stop him for good! It's a simple story that does exactly what it needs to to set up the action.

As for the gameplay, it's a continuation of the copy ability-based platforming that began in Kirby's Adventure. You've got 7 worlds worth of levels to go through with the help of your animal buddies, and if you're daring enough, you can even hunt down the rainbow drop hidden in each world. The game's a pretty tough one, though pretty standard for Kirby at the time. What's really tough is getting those rainbow drops and fighting Dark Matter at the end (who's a really tough cookie, even for a real final Kirby boss). The level design is all around solid, but the animal friends often feel more like burdens than aids, and while their variations on Kirby's copy abilities are neat, they very often feel like outright downgrades to his normal abilities. It isn't awful, but it's definitely a bumpier step on the road to finer Kirby level design like we'd come to see in games like Kirby 64.

The graphics are very nice as is the music, and you can tell a lot of love went into this one. My only real complaint is that the graphical limitations of the GameBoy kinda interfere with your ability to actually tell what destructible blocks are broken by which power. The blocks just have patterns on them to differentiate them from one another, but these patterns are rarely obvious as to what power breaks them. There was more than once where I had to redo a quite difficult platforming section with an animal companion because I found when I got to the rainbow drop at the end that I'd brought the wrong power to break this particular weird pattern of blocks XP. It's not game-breaking, as you can always just look up what breaks what online, but it does make for a more frustrating baseline experience than a game that could use color would likely allow for.

Verdict: Recommended. This is far from the best Kirby game, sure, but it's still a very solid one. If you're looking for something fun but challenging to play on your GameBoy, this is a fine game to look out for~.

----

11. Tales of Vesperia (PS3) *

This is sorta a replay and sorta not a replay. My original Tales of Vesperia review is not only up on this site, but it's also one of the very first ones I wrote here~. Granted it's so short that it's hardly a review by the standards of how I write them these days ^^;. With that in mind, with a close friend of mine also starting to play this for their first time, I figured now was as good a time as ever to replay through this, and play through the PS3 version that has the updated content in it (the same content that's in the most recent remastered international version). It took me around 70 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware. (which is a little odd, given that it took me less time to beat the 360 version and yet I feel I messed around aimlessly a lot less in this playthrough, but whatever).

Tales of Vesperia is the tale of Yuri Lowell, a vigilante who dropped out of the royal guard after becoming disillusioned with their way of meting out justice. What starts as a quest to capture the thief who stole the power supply to the slums' fresh water supply (predictably) eventually ends up becoming a quest to not only stop a corrupt government, but one to save the world itself from a fiendish and monstrous foe. This wasn't the first Tales game I beat, but it's the one that made me a fan of the series, especially with its wonderful and fun character writing. I've been curious for years how it'd hold up to a replay, and I can say for sure that at least the character writing (up to and including the new addition to the cast, Patty) is still excellent and very charming. The greater narrative however... failed to impress ^^;

Vesperia, at its core, has an environmentalist message above all others. However, it also has a lot to say about justice with the dynamic between Yuri, a vigilante, and his childhood friend (and captain in the royal guard, trying to change the system from the inside) Flynn Scifo. It also has a lot to say about governance and a fair amount else, but it casts far too wide a net. Fun and charming character writing aside, its environmental and political metaphors get terribly confused and difficult to discern by the end (and following some to their logical conclusions, you can arrive at some rather unfortunate ones).

Character arcs are for the most part alright, but with the big exception of Yuri. His entire arc sorta relies on you, the player, buying into the game's core assumption that his way of doing things, killing people on his own idea of justice, is inherently wrong. But the game does an awful job of convincing you on this point, and really just expects you to believe that at face value (despite that fact that everyone he kills on his own initiative is a cartoonishly evil and irredeemable person (not to mention they're also often offensive stereotypes in one way or another), and honestly the game suffers from generally poorly written villains on the whole). Yuri's dialogue writing is fine, but his character arc being so poorly, coupled with the poor construction of the larger themes, drags the overall quality of the narrative down significantly, and for anyone who likes to dissect the messages in the media they enjoy, they will likely find a quite frustratingly mixed experience with Tales of Vesperia.

Gameplay-wise, Vesperia is a really solid improvement on the 3D Tales games up to that point. Continuing on from the trend from Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss before it, the 3D action combat system works really well and feels fun to engage with, and it's been tuned up very nicely from those games. Boss battles also have 'secret missions' you can do, which while ostensibly a mechanic focused around achievement hunting, is still a fun way to spice up the weaknesses bosses often have in these games. Granted, some of these secret missions are pretty damn hard and/or very hard to figure out without a guide, but they're still a fun additional gimmick for this game. All in all, it's a simple to learn and fun to master system that's not quite at just how complicated the system would get come the following Tales of Graces.

The presentation is very nice. Though it's a bit of a shame to have the step down from 1080p to 720p going from the 360 to the PS3 version, the game's anime art style still comes through very well and in a way that doesn't tend to tank the framerate either (though that does still happen sometimes ^^;). The music is quite nice too, and it does a good job of setting moods and atmospheres.

Verdict: Recommended. This is still quite a good game, though it's certainly nowhere near as good as the Tales games that would come after it. If you aren't as much of a media studies person as me, the writing likely won't bother you nearly as much as it did for me (just like it didn't really bother me when I played it years ago when I was much less up on media studies stuff). The remaster's English VA is pretty awful in how it didn't get the original VA back for their new lines, but if you can stand that, this is a perfectly fine game to get into the Tales series with if you were so inclined~.

----

12. Art Style: BOXLIFE (DSi)

With the 3DS and Wii U eshops shutting down soon, I took the chance to look into what the stores still had to offer, and one thing that I remembered most quickly were the Art Style games I hadn't looked at yet! I really enjoyed PictoBits, and even though I've very often heard that that's one of the best of the bunch, this game also came highly recommended, so I grabbed it as well. It took me about 2.5 hours to get through the R&D section and get to the credits, and also to mess around in the score attack mode a bit. I played it in English and on my New 3DS XL.

BOXLIFE is a puzzle game all about getting big sheets of squares and cutting them in such a way that you can fold the cut piece into a cube. Of course, there are only so many configurations of 6 squares that they can fold up into a cube, so you need to take care in how you do your slicing and dicing. The game's R&D section is basically your tutorial for the score attack section, as it presents an increasingly hard selection of time attack modes that introduce to you a new way to fold a cube each time, and you need to cut and fold 10 large sheets of squares into cubes before the timer runs out. As the sheets of squares you get get larger and larger, it gets trickier and trickier to get it perfect, and it gets to be a real doozy by the end of it. Each sheet does technically have a pre-determined set of patterns that it can be cut into to make squares, but especially for the larger sheets, there's very often more than one correct answer (although you will be given the pre-determined set as a hint if you take more than 10 or so seconds to solve it). The end result is a puzzle game that's incredibly addicting, and if you're anything like me, it might have you end up looking at things in your real life with your brain trying to turn them into cubes without you even trying XD

The presentation of the game is very simple but also very charming. The little worker men who work at the box factory are simple but cute, and all the furniture you earn for your little worker's "Box Life" in the score attack mode is adorable as well. There are a good handful of music tracks, one for each level of difficulty, and they fit the game great, and provide excellent background atmosphere for cube forming~.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely up there with PictoBits as an absolutely great time in the Art Style series of games. It's definitely not easy, but it's so darn fun and addicting that even if you can't make it to the credits, there's still tons of fun to be had in the score attack mode. This is absolutely one to look out for if you're looking for goodies on the 3DS eshop and aren't quite sure what to pick up~.
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Limewater
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by Limewater Mon May 16, 2022 2:59 pm

PartridgeSenpai wrote:There was more than once where I had to redo a quite difficult platforming section with an animal companion because I found when I got to the rainbow drop at the end that I'd brought the wrong power to break this particular weird pattern of blocks XP. It's not game-breaking, as you can always just look up what breaks what online, but it does make for a more frustrating baseline experience than a game that could use color would likely allow for.


That's funny. I played through Kirby's Dreamland II last year and hardly ever had trouble distinguishing which blocks were destroyed by which weapon, as opposed to games that use color as a distinguishing feature, which regularly causes me trouble.
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Re: Games Beaten 2022

by ElkinFencer10 Mon May 16, 2022 7:46 pm

Games Beaten in 2021 - 25
* denotes a replay

January (20 Games Beaten)
1. Project MIKHAIL: A Muv-Luv War Story - Steam - January 1
2. Shin Megami Tensei V - Switch - January 9
3. Halo 2600 - Atari 2600 - January 10
4. Cruis'n Blast - Switch - January 13
5. Alan Wake - PlayStation 5 - January 15
6. Alan Wake's American Nightmare - Xbox 360 - January 15
7. Apsulov: End of Gods - Playstation 5 - January 16
8. Captain U - Wii U - January 16
9. Raji: An Ancient Epic - Xbox One - January 17
10. JankBrain - Switch - January 22
11. Would You Like to Run an Idol Café - Switch - January 22
12. Bury Me, My Love - Switch - January 22
13. A Normal Lost Phone - Switch - January 22
14. Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story - Switch - January 22
15. Cthulhu Saves Christmas - Switch - January 23
16. Armed 7 - Dreamcast - January 24
17. Satazius Next - Dreamcast - January 24
18. Wolflame - Dreamcast - January 25
19. Metal Slug 1st Mission - Neo Geo Pocket - January 25
20. Metal Slug 2nd Mission - Neo Geo Pocket - January 26


February (1 Games Beaten)
21. Pokemon Legends: Arceus - Switch - February 5


March (0 Games Beaten)
wow I suck ass lmao


April (3 Games Beaten)
22. The Last of Us Part II - PlayStation 4 - April 9
23. Metro 2033 Redux - PlayStation 4 - April 14
24. Sakura Angels - Switch - April 26


May (1 Games Beaten)
25. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures - Gamecube - May 8


25. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures - Gamecube - May 8

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One of the very few Zelda games that I’d never played before was Four Swords Adventure simply because it’s so hard to find four people willing to commit and enough hardware to actually play through it. Thankfully, though, I found a local retro gamer group on Facebook and was able to meet up with my friends Heather, John, and Brandon several times between January and May of this year to play through the game, and it was a great time both as a game and socially in general. It got this old hermit out of his shell.

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The game feels a lot like a typical 2D Zelda adventure just with support for four player co-op. Your adventure takes you through 24 stages spanning eight areas and 10 boss battles. Most of the game’s enemies and weapons are familiar to longtime Zelda fans, but there’s enough new that keeps the game fresh and exciting even for veteran players. While it’s not nearly as good as Link to the Past from the SNES era, Four Swords Adventures is very reminiscent of that game and feels very much like an homage to it. The game’s graphics look like what I imagine Link to the Past being if it were made on a stronger 2D system, and while I think the sound design isn’t as good as games like Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, or Breath of the Wild, it’s still a Zelda game which means that the soundtrack is fantastic.

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What makes the game totally unique is that it requires Game Boy Advance systems and Gamecube link cables to play. The Gamecube is playing the game, but the connected GBAs are used to control your character, and within certain parts of dungeons, you use the GBA screen to see your character. Most of the action stays on the main screen, and every player has to be together at the screen’s edge to move to the screen to the next area, but the shift from the main screen to Game Boy Advance screen is an extremely cool way to structure a multiplayer Zelda even if it does get costly to make sure everyone has a GBA and cable to link to the Gamecube.

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It’s a shame that this game is so cumbersome to play in 2022 because it really is a fantastic co-op experience. There just aren’t that many people that have a Gamecube, the game, four GBAs, and four link cables outside of groups of retro gaming enthusiasts. I wish Nintendo would re-release this game - even if only digitally - on Switch and allow for online multiplayer. It would give this game a new lease on life with an infinitely more convenient way to play. Still, though, cumbersome logistics aside, if you find a group of friends with the needed hardware and have the opportunity to play this game, I strongly recommend it.
Exhuminator wrote:Ecchi lords must unite for great justice.

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